Historypin Bloghttp://blog.historypin.org
Thu, 08 Dec 2016 02:11:40 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.2Is this your local pub? We need your help!http://blog.historypin.org/2016/05/03/is-this-your-local-pub-we-need-your-help/
Tue, 03 May 2016 08:45:08 +0000http://blog.historypin.org/?p=5659Continue reading →]]>Since early 2014, Historypin has been collaborating with the National Brewery Heritage Trust to make their archive of 3,500 never-before-seen photos of pubs owned by the Charrington Brewery accessible on Historypin.org.

The Bedford Tavern, London

These unique glimpses into the past of public houses all around the south east of England are now available to be browsed on www.historypin.org/pubs, but that is not the end of this project. We need your help and expertise to improve this priceless collection.

Can you spot your local? Did you find the pub you used to go to in your home town?

Use our new tool ‘Suggest a better location’ to tell us their address so they can be displayed more accurately on the Historypin.org website. Because the entire archive has been uploaded automatically, some pubs are not in the right location and we would love your help to fix this.

Go to www.historypin.org/pubs and use the map to find your neighbourhood and its pubs. If you have a specific pub in mind, you can try searching it by name using the search bar.

When you have found your pub photo, scroll down and click ‘Suggest a better location’ above the small map on the right.

Fill out the correct address and add a comment to indicate why you have changed the location.

Click ‘Save’ and, if you’d like, share the pub photo with your friends and networks. Perhaps they would like to help improve the collection too?

For more information about our new crowdsourcing tools, read our blogpost here.

The new ‘Suggest a better location’ tool on Historypin.org

To find out more about the National Brewery Heritage Trust, the Charrington archive and Europeana Food and Drink, the project which has made this work possible, visit www.londonlocalpubs.com

Hearing stories around photos brought in by a resident at Rhoda Goldman Plaza, an assisted living facility in San Francisco, CA.

Recently, the Historypin team in San Francisco, and a memory care home in West Lafayette, Indiana, have run/will run pilots on using Historypin with seniors. Here is a short breakdown:

Historypin in SF: As part of Historypin’s Bay Area Jewish project Sourdough & Rye, the San Francisco team helped carry out a community pilot at Rhoda Goldman Plaza, a senior care home in the city. Over two two-week rounds, we worked with a handful of seniors to help them think about their lives in terms of place, while behind-the-scenes thinking about the materials we would need to get these memories from the room to Historypin. Some important places we tried to highlight were childhood homes, a first school, where a resident was married, first job, etc.

Using Historypin in an Indiana care home: At the end of September 2015, the Westminster Village care home, in West Lafayette, Indiana, will team up with the West Lafayette Public Library to help the care home residents contribute photos focused on Tippecanoe County (encompassing the WL area) or wherever they consider “home” prior to moving to Westminster. The WLPL will use these contributions as the basis for a “Westminster Collection” on Historypin, and the pilot will be treated as a gateway activity; residents who are interested in participating more fully with their personal history will receive assistance on establishing a separate Historypin Tour.

Some resources so far on procedure:

RG Plaza:

Before our first iteration, we came up with a format that includes a binder or folder with a number of worksheets. This included a consent form and a brief bio form. There were also sheets that represent info from a pin on Historypin, where we could record a resident’s memories of particular places. During this first iteration, we recruited volunteers to help us record info in small groups. Not wanting to solely rely on the internet at RGP, most of this session was done mainly offline.

After this first iteration, we came up with a format that includes a booklet that correspond to the Tour functionality on Historypin: a cover sheet which has a map and place for a participant photo, and pages which represent the info from a pin, including a map and place for an address, a place to clip a photo, date and other details. Along with this booklet we included a consent form.

August 28th, 2015: Here I am with Maxine Greenspan, a resident of Rhoda Goldman and subject of our first completed Tour (at the link below.)

For the second iteration, we did an introductory presentation to residents, showing them an example of a completed Tour (and pins). We really underlined this time that we’re trying to “put life stories on the map,” which is about individuals on their own journey, but also about the communities they’ve been a part of in their life. Then we set up 90-minute slots to gather content and stories (had 2-3 people on our team working with individuals), during which we used a recorder and a laptop to explore places as residents remembered them. The idea was to think through the booklet we made, and try to pull out around 5 important places that could encompass “Mapping the Story of My Life.” We are continuing to put together Historypin Tours based on these second round of interviews, many of which built upon resident interviews during the first round.

Westminster: Though still in the process of prep, the overall plan is as follows:

Resident Collection sheets will be distributed at the close of the introductory presentation, and also direct to resident mailboxes. The sheets will include general information about the photo(s) residents want to contribute, and a waiver for public use.

Residents will be asked to bring their completed collection sheet with their photos to scanning workshop dates, where their information sheet with a signature and photo will be scanned (separately) and saved. During each workshop, the WLPL will provide one scanning station and WV will provide a second. WLPL will upload all scanned photos and content to Historypin.

After the initial scan workshop WLPL will, based on interest, continue additional scanning workshops in conjunction with normal bi-weekly WLPL visits to Westminster.

After the “Westminster Collection” is complete, WV will coordinate a program for residents to see the finished collection on Historypin.

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All of the above briefly summarizes the thinking and set-up behind starting community memory pilots two senior care homes. Note that these are both still underway, but please field any questions you have here!

Find out more about your wartime family artefacts
Experts will be on hand to tell you more about your First World War object. If you’re bringing an object, you will get free entry to Bletchley Park – details on how to apply here.

Get a 3D scan of your objectsThe University of Hertfordshire will be there with a 3D scanner to digitise objects.

Add your photos and stories to the First World War Centenary Hub on HistorypinThe Historypin team will be on hand to scan your photos and add your stories to the hub.

Meet other people and hear First World War storiesConnect with other people researching and commemorating the First World War and hear the stories they have been discovering.

Visit “The Road to Bletchley Park”, an exhibition on World War One code-breakingThe exhibition tells the little known story of signals intelligence which played a crucial role during the First World War. Read more here.

Krista White, Digital Humanities Librarian and Head of Media Services at the John Cotton Dana Library at Rutgers University, leading a Historypin workshop for teachers on July 15th. Source: Twitter

I recently had the pleasure of hearing from Mary Grace Wheelan (New Jersey Council for the Humanities (NJCH)) and Krista White (Rutgers University Libraries), who helped put together a Historypin training workshop for teachers at Rutgers’ Price Institute this past July. The workshop, part of a NJCH teacher development series called “Making Local History Matter,” introduced Historypin amongst a variety of digital tools to aid students in becoming community historians. Mary Grace and Krista had some really good feedback, not only about their experiences running the workshop but first-hand experiences from teachers on using Historypin. Some examples:

Mary Grace stressed the importance of showing and not just telling during a workshop. “You need to let people practice.”

Prep work always helps (and we second this!): They asked teachers to bring in one photograph of a place in their neighborhood beforehand so they had something to pin during the workshop. They also thought about the staff they would need to assist teachers during the session, and ended up enlisting two aids based upon how many people signed up.

File management: Krista and Mary Grace brought up that many teachers did not immediately think of file management when going in to use Historypin. They suggested Google Drive as an option for administering their projects, where teachers can have students initially submit photos plus the accompanying information via a simple Google Form. Analog forms are also an option, examples of which we have on our schools page.

Speaking of Google tools: They also pointed out that you shouldn’t assume that all teachers are familiar with Google tools (some of the teachers in the workshop were not), and have a way of gauging this either before or at the beginning of the workshop so no one gets left behind.

This is a sample of some of their useful feedback, and we want to hear from you too. Do any teachers have tips on running Historypin workshops? What works for you and what doesn’t? Do you as a teacher have particular concerns over using Historypin with your students?

Rose Marie Cleese displays a handful of old photos and with the help of Kerri Young of Historypin scans the historic pictures at a workstation on the main floor of the California Historical Society Friday, July 17, 2015. Photo by Mike Koozmin, S.F. Examiner.

On July 17th, our US team collaborated in a public launch of Historypin’s new 1915 San Francisco World’s Fair mapping project with the California Historical Society (CHS), on the 100th anniversary of the iconic Liberty Bell arriving at the fair. The Liberty Bell, an American icon and symbol of independence, traveled over 3,000 miles by rail from its home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after hundreds of thousands of school children signed a petition to get the bell to San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). In CHS’s gallery festively-decorated with paper bells, Community Officer Kerri Young helped Rose Marie Cleese, the granddaughter of San Francisco’s former Mayor Angelo Rossi (1931-44), scan never-before-seen family photographs into our new digital project.

At the time of the fair, Rossi was a florist who helped design and build the ornate float that carried the Liberty Bell from San Francisco’s Townsend Street rail station to the fairgrounds in what is now the city’s Marina district. Rose Marie contributed photographs of the float on its procession, as well as of her grandparents and mother posing with the Bell in its temporary home in the fair’s Pennsylvania Building. Remarkably, Historypin contributor Lynn Sons was able to identify her own grandfather, who was a member of the Liberty Bell Honor Guard at the fair, in one of the photos that Rose Marie contributed, and we were able to connect the two of them in this piece of shared history.

The Liberty Bell sub-project is a great example of the collaborative archiving we hope to encourage around the PPIE, with institutions such as the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and The San Francisco Public Library contributing along with individuals like Rose Marie and Lynn Sons. We hope that many others will be inspired to contribute their family photographs and help enrich the 2000+ existing pins in the project as we continue to celebrate this special centenary year.

Here are a few photographs of our fun day scanning and pinning:

Scanning station set-up in the California Historical Society with Rose Marie’s photographs.

A sample of some of the family photographs brought in by Rose Marie for scanning.

Showing Rose Marie photos of her grandfather’s floral company Pelicano, Rossi & Co. displaying at the fair in photos contributed by UC Davis Libraries. Rose Marie had never seen these previously and was very excited to see that they had been contributed to the project!

The Liberty Bell being paraded up San Francisco’s Van Ness Ave in July 1915 on the float designed by Rossi. In the foreground is James J. Quirk, identified by his granddaughter Lynn Sons.

Three generations of the Rossi family: Rose Marie poses with her nephew Ron Forsell and grandchildren Grace and Matt, while holding a photo of her own mother and grandfather at the PPIE.

See some great local media coverage of this event here and here, and add your own photos or comments about the fair by visiting the project page here.

Cover page of our new pdf, “Historypin in the Community,” which you can read online.

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen Historypin used to connect generations in Japan, to draw in rich life stories in Australia and even to inspire a mural in East London. These sorts of projects are at the core of our mission to build better local social connections through a shared sense of place and history.

We worked together with our wonderful partners in the UK to create a document highlighting some of these projects over the past two years, with each case study giving you a brief glimpse of the people behind these projects and what they’ve achieved. As we continue to develop our community tools and articulate our mission, this document provides examples of how our experiences on projects helps to both compliment and improve this work.

An example of a case study within “Historypin in the Community.”

We are certainly proud of all the different ways communities all over the world are using Historypin tools. If you have ideas for a project using Historypin in your local area, please contact our Executive Director Breandán at breandan.knowlton@historypin.org.

]]>http://blog.historypin.org/2015/06/29/a-new-case-study-document-historypin-in-the-community/feed/1Historypin and LODLAMhttp://blog.historypin.org/2015/06/29/historypin-and-lodlam/
Mon, 29 Jun 2015 04:41:57 +0000http://blog.historypin.org/?p=5513Continue reading →]]>I’m excited to have a chance to facilitate the 3rd International Linked Open Data in Library, Archives & Museums Summit (LODLAM) in Sydney 29-30 June, 2015. As part of it, I want to debut a sneak peek into some linked data work our team is doing together with Europeana.

The idea is to address the challenge of “roundtripping of data,” when projects like Historypin are able to provide community enrichment to institutional collections and institutions can in turn ingest those enrichments and comments. A lot of this is looking at using Linked Data to improve upon or provide an alternative to OAI-PMH, which is more in tune with methods that can be used by web developers at large.

In our case, we have created an API to allow access to annotations on our site (other APIs in the works), and we’ve utilized Open Annotation and JSONLD to make this available to Europeana to harvest and ingest back into their records.

1. users annotate or enrich the records

2. this data is expressed using OA and JSON-LD

3. Europeana has created a query tool which will not just be for us eventually, in which they request annotations within a certain time window.

This shows the source, and then the transformation which maps it to the Europeana Data Model, and finally a response from the query about whether or not this has been written to Europeana.

A pilot group at Florida State University on June 18th exploring Historypin as at tool to map out historic FSU photos. The university’s library (and Digital Scholarship group) is embarking on a pilot project, using our site, to help more-widely circulate its digital collections. Photo by Micah Vandegrift via Twitter (click for original).

Here is a late-June roundup of some of the great ways people have been using Historypin recently and sharing it with us over social media:

New York City preservationists have just won additional funding to help map places in the city important to the LGBTQ community on Historypin.

The New York LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, led by Jay Shockley, has received funding from the New York Community Trust and the Arcus Foundation to map out sites with potential national landmark status. Allison Miller (@Cliopticon), shared in her American Historical Association blog post how the project work over Historypin will take this a step further “by collaborating with academic historians and archivists (who will provide layers of “context” for each site) and, in a subsequent phase, LGBTQ community members themselves (who will crowdsource layers of the map with documents from their personal archives, such as photographs and letters).”

Some early precedents: A Google map that stems from a NYC LGBTQ walking tour made in 1994 by the Organization of Lesbian + Gay Architects and Designers (OLGAD), of which Jay Shockley helped to coordinate. Shockley is now a staff member at the New York City Landmark Preservation Commission.

Miller also points out that this project follows on the heels of a similar initiative happening in California for LGBTQ sites, Historypin project California Pride.

Public History graduate students at American University in Washington D.C. are sharing how they are using Historypin in the context of their studies.

Alexandra Erichson shared in her blog post “Inconvenient Camels” the experience of using Historypin for a class assignment. In particular, she talks about the experience of utilizing our Street View feature, while pinning images from both the British Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art of early 20th century Egypt. Read Alexandra’s post here.

Problems that only those who do Street View overlays understand: Sometimes, things block your perfect overlay, and in Alexandra’s case, a camel!

Sydney Johnson, another student of Public History at AU, also writes about her experiences of using Historypin for the first time, and explores how adding “space” into the the process of content curation and sharing brings “a deeper connection with the material being presented.” She created the Tour “Freedom Summer,” as an opportunity to help memorialize sites important to minority experiences.

A local San Francisco Bay Area archive and a museum took a #PINOFTHEDAY as opportunity to reflect on an important WWII event.

Our recent #PINOFTHDAY came from the collection of UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, who are sharing new content on our site ahead of the Rare Books & Manuscripts Conference in Oakland and Berkeley at the end of this month. The WWII-era image, a photo by famed photographer Dorothea Lange, depicts those of Japanese descent on the sidewalk about to travel to internment camps across California. The photo, taken of what is now the site of the Oakland Museum of California, prompted the museum to share a reflective post with their followers, copied below.

Our June 15th #PINOFTHEDAY from the Bancroft Library. Click the image to read see the Oakland Museum’s post/discussion on Facebook.

Layering the past and the present in a whole new way…

Historypin is a web platform where historians, community members, and everyday people from around the world can share the history of places that matter to them. As the “Museum of the People”, the location of the Oakland Museum of California holds a special place in the hearts of many communities… but it wasn’t always that way. Yesterday’s Pin of the Day on HistoryPin came from The Bancroft Library showed a photo taken in 1942 by Dorothea Lange at 1118 Oak Street, where Japanese Americans were gathered for their forcible removal during World War II. The site of this painful event would later become the location for the Museum.

We’re having fun hearing from many more folks around the world using Historypin to share the history of places. If you have a project that you’re working on that you’d like us to feature in one of these posts, email me at kerri.young@historypin.org

Lauren Tabak of the Lexington Club Archival Project, presenting on how they are working to preserve the memories of San Francisco’s iconic lesbian bar. The lovely California Historical Society (a partner on the project) served as our venue for the night.

Last night, we held the first workshop for California Pride, a new project to map out important LGBTQ places and stories in the state of California. With collaborators the Lexington Club Archival Project, GLBT Historical Society, and Bay Area Lesbian History Archives Project on hand, the aim of night was to introduce attendees to the project on Historypin and facilitate a story-collecting session focusing on LGBTQ places in California meaningful to them. We called it a “pinning party” and it was certainly a lot of fun! Our friends at the California Historical Society (CHS), a partner on the project, were kind enough to host the event in their exhibition space in downtown San Francisco, and helped us organize the event along with California Pride power co-founders Donna Graves and Shayne Watson.

After great introductions from CHS, the Lexington Project, Shayne, and Donna, we broke into smaller groups for our story-collecting session. Thanks to outreach from Donna and Shayne, we had over 7 fantastic volunteers including students from UC Berkeley and friends from SF Heritage and the National Park Service. Each volunteer helped to facilitate conversations in each group and the filling-out of story sheets we created for the night; these sheets asked for information specific to pinning on Historypin such as location and date, and stories shared will either contribute to a new pin or help enrich an existing pin in the project.

A highlight of the night was the end of the event, where Donna invited volunteers and participants to come up to the mic and share a story heard or told as part of their individual groups. This was a great way to tie-together the session, and an opportunity for the entire room to share in some of the stories collected throughout the night. Overall, this was a fantastic event that helped bring together those in the local community both actively preserving and interested in preserving LGBTQ history, while introducing how participants could continue sharing their stories on Historypin. Hopefully this is first of many, we’ve already received interest from Sacramento and Los Angeles. Thanks to all who helped organize!

(right) a partial view of the story sheet that we distributed for the event, and (left) a (unfortunately) blurry photo of an attendee holding one!

Lenn Keller poses with a board of memories she brought in as part of the Bay Area Lesbian History Archives Project. Photo credit Matthew S. Bajko.

Moses Corrette posing with his pin on Historypin after we recorded his story about the house where the “guerilla bar movement” was formed, where members of the LGBTQ community would meet once-a-month and pick out non-queer bars in which to gather and hang out. Though not planned for the night, I managed to live-pin Moses’ story with my laptop, and we were even able to do some quick-fire research on places to help jog some memories.

Attendee Drew shares a funny and powerful story of reclaiming Halloween for the LGBTQ community in San Francisco’s Castro district.

Posing with my fantastic story-group members (from left) Xan, Patricia, and Zoe, who shared wonderful stories of their LGBTQ activism in the last few decades, not only in California but around the country. I felt lucky to be able to spend time with these fantastic women and to help record some of their stories onto Historypin.

Posing with the night’s great organizers Shayne Watson (middle) and Donna Graves (right), who have taken years of work on San Francisco’s Historic Context Statement for LGBTQ history to now a new project collaboration over Historypin.

]]>Community Archiving, Strategies for Engagementhttp://blog.historypin.org/2015/05/05/community-archiving-strategies-for-engagement/
Tue, 05 May 2015 15:00:33 +0000http://blog.historypin.org/?p=5434Continue reading →]]>We held a web seminar in October 2014 as a followup from our work with Natalie Milbrodt and the Queens Public Library around Queens: Neighborhood Stories. The project, funded by the Metropolitan New York Library Council, sought to explore possibilities for engagement through community archiving sessions at branch libraries. In addition to Natalie’s work throughout the project, we had great support from Anne Karle-Zenith and the team at METRO. They encouraged us to explore some of the lessons that could be shared with those taking on similar projects, which we were of course happy to do. The 6 videos running a total time of just over an hour are embedded below in a playlist, which you can also access here.

We’re continuing to build on these lessons and would love to hear from you as well. Please use the comments space below to share some of the things that have worked with you, or to ask questions of the team.